Imagine what VW, Mercedes, BMW, and Porsche could have achieved if they had pushed innovation instead of continued lobbying to keep outdated technology alive

Look what showed up in my mail today, my favorite European politics textbook courtesy of @catherinedevries.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @sopro.bsky.social @jbslapin.bsky.social. My students love the data exercises built on their custom Shiny apps!

ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

The Commission moves for relaxing state aid rules.
I am not a big fan of relaxing them without joint fiscal action. It results into asymmetric crisis absorption (countries with more fiscal space do more) and therefore transform symmetric shocks into a-symmetric ones.

Blühende Bäume beim Zeiss-Großplanetarium im Prenzlauer Berg:

Babysitting this bad boy in Berlin the next 9 days:

London Whisky festival:

The V-Dem Steering Committee's release statement for v.16 of the dataset (link in the post below):

Unknown Mortal Orchestra last night in Vega:

Belle & Sebastian last night at Amager Bio:

Join us TODAY @ 4:15 pm for our annual August Zaleski Memorial Lecture in Modern Polish History! Acclaimed film director Agnieszka Holland will discuss the origins of dystopia and its renewed relevance today.

📍 Tsai Auditorium, CGIS South Building

Gør os gerne selskab på tirsdag:

😂

A heron:

Christmas Eve for Danish political scientists falls on March 24th!

Surveyeksperimentet går sin sejrsgang inden for samfundsvidenskaberne. Uanset om du er forsker eller studerende i gang med dit speciale, er dette arrangement for dig. Bliv klogere på en af de mest udbredte metoder til at skabe væsentlig viden i dag. Tilmelding her: surveyselskab.dk/event/survey...

Hotel ♥️

Malmø:

Our study of the impact of policy on excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic is out @plosone.org.

We find that the policy measures saved lives. They did so by reducing mobility (in addition to people's direct reactions to the pandemic) and other channels.

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Academic articles rarely make me laugh at work. But this line did it: “Opposition to social dominance leads to support for antisystem roles, such as radical, terrorist, and college professor (Levin et al. 2003).” Tyler (2006: 388). Finally, my career choice is explained!

All good wishes for 2026 from Copenhagen Ø:

Barcelona

Why American Jews Eat Chinese Food on Christmas A lack of dining options may have started Jewish Christmas, but now it’s a full-fledged ritual.

Same procedure as every year... time to share my favorite Christmas-related article. Why American Jews Eat Chinese Food on Christmas? Merry Christmas! www.theatlantic.com/national/arc...

👩👨 Do gender quotas increase legislative voting attendance?

Mads Dagnis Jensen & Suen Wang study EP roll-call attendance and find that quotas boost women’s attendance and reduce men’s 👇

🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Photo © European Union 2025 - Source : EP

Love that you map descriptive representation to substantive representation and link it to quotas.

A paper worth reading.

Do gender quotas increase legislative voting attendance? The case of the European Parliament Research on gender quotas in the European Parliament has grown markedly. Yet we do not know how quotas influence participation in plenary votes and how these effects differ across policy domains. W...

Do gender quotas increase voting attendance in the European Parliament? Using monthly roll-call data and a generalised DiD, we find that quotas:
✨ raise women’s attendance by 2% points, especially in gender-salient areas;
⬇️ lower men’s attendance. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....:

Tierpark in Berlin:

Trianglen by night.

Locking Down Civil Society: The Impact of COVID-19 - VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations This paper examines patterns of volunteering during COVID-19 in different areas of civil society and demographic groups in Denmark. The aim is to understand how differences in the areas of civil socie...

How did covid lockdowns affect different sectors of voluntary civil society and segments of volunteers? We Use a four wave panel running from April 2020 to april 2021 to answer these questions in "Locking Down Civil Society: The Impact of COVID-19" in Voluntas:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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The season’s first snowfall: